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Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them

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There are a few words that raise a red flag when I catch myself saying them, at least when I’m not totally preoccupied.

Not that all instances of these words are dubious, but I do find I that whenever I need to make use of them, there’s a good chance I’m being at least a little presumptuous, simple-minded, or sneaky. They raise a similar red flag when I hear or read them too.

They aren’t “bad” words, but they do lend themselves to a certain kind of self-deception. They often hint at more going on.

“Wish”

I find myself using the word “wish” when I’ve decided I don’t like something the way it is, yet I’m not actually doing anything about it. There’s no real reason to declare my wishes. Whenever I start a sentence with “I just wish…” feel free to ignore me, I’m only wasting your time. My whiny face has probably made you tune out anyway.

Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be happy if they were like this. So there.”

Not only is it useless for changing the circumstances, but it reinforces the myth to which I’ve momentarily fallen prey: that my happiness is dependent on my circumstances only and has nothing to do with my attitude. It’s a bitter little plea that life isn’t what I want it to be in this particular moment, and a dead giveaway that I’m not prepared to do anything about it right now.

Wishing is a desperate, self-defensive behavior. It gives you a little hit of relief from a reality you don’t want to deal with, but it sure doesn’t move things along.

Of course, in those moments, I’m too consumed by my fantasies to see that my attitude is usually the biggest and most damning feature of the present circumstances. If my attitude sucks, the circumstances suck. But acknowledging that would mean I have to be responsible for it, and it’s easier to instead wish for the cavalry to appear on the horizon and save me.

“Try”

I don’t know about you, but I know I insert the word “try” into a sentence when I’m not actually willing to take on the responsibility of promising I’ll do something. Yet I’m still willing to pretend I at least have the intention of doing it — somewhere in my mind.

I’ll try to call and ask about that. I’ll try to exercise every day. I’ll try to get it done on Friday after work.

It means: I might end up doing that if it’s easier than I expect it to be. Read More

by David on April 25, 2011
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Why Your Fears Won’t Come True

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Fear doesn’t work the way we think it does. I’ll teach you something cool about fear that you can start putting to use right away.

When something scares you, you usually just have an aversion to the notion of that thing. Just the thought of making certain phone calls, confronting certain people, or making certain commitments makes the butterflies bubble up.

This is the point where we usually back down, and distract ourselves from the thought of it by checking email or doing some cleaning or organizing that suddenly seems important.

Quitting my last job to go traveling was something I was afraid of for a long time before I did it. It was a very small company, my boss had been good to me, and I knew it was going to be a blow that came out of nowhere. The thought of it made me nervous, and I decided to put it off till the next day, ten or twelve times.

Most fears keep us at arm’s length like that: we back down at just the idea of doing something nerve-wracking. The fear has done its job — to keep us from going there — and so we don’t look any closer at what it is we’re really afraid of about that idea.

If you do look closely at almost any fear, it’s always a specific moment you’re fearing. A moment with awful feelings in it — awkwardness, pain, shame, guilt, horror, angst. Life unfolds only in moments, so what else could the problem be except some of the moments that you might run into?

Ultimately that’s all you are ever fearing: moments that you believe will force you to experience feelings you really don’t want to experience. If you really break it down there’s nothing else that drives us but the appeal of feelings we want to experience and the fear of feelings we don’t want to experience.

Whatever the feeling is, it’s a feeling you’ve already experienced at some point in your life. You couldn’t be afraid of it if you hadn’t.

The longer we live, the more nasty experiences we have, and the more fears we carry around. But we forget that it’s really acute experiences we’re trying to avoid, and instead we let entire categories of actions and notions get dismissed from our lives, because they represent those experiences.

The cat who was afraid of grass for all the wrong reasons

We had a cat who was afraid of the front lawn. She would creep up to it, sniff it a bit, then tear across it like she was being chased. I watched her do this a few times before learning that my Dad had once turned on the sprinkler hose while she was lying beside it. After that, to her the lawn was a bad place, because it represented the threat of a terrible experience she didn’t want to have again.

She got over it, probably after accidentally having a few good experiences around the lawn. Animals are probably better at forgetting this stuff. Humans cling to fears because our thinking is so hopelessly lost in symbols and categories. We hold onto this idea that we can fence off the painful areas of life if we’re careful enough. Read More

by David on March 9, 2011
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The World is Quietly Asking You to Get Your Shit Together

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The police officer sat in his ghost car for a few moments before getting out, letting me wonder why he stopped me. I knew I wasn’t speeding, and that made me worried.

This was yesterday.

Over the last 48 hours I’ve been pummeled with what I can only take to be clear messages to get my shit together in certain areas of my life. I’m not sure I’m a believer that these kinds of jarring events are signs from above, but maybe it doesn’t matter — it makes sense to treat them like they are.

Turns out my license and auto insurance expired three weeks ago. A cop in an unmarked car spotted my outdated tag and pulled me over. He gave me two pink forms entitled “You have been charged with an offense”, saying that I have to appear before a magistrate in a few months to receive my fines.

As I was staring at the forms, sighing over however many hundreds of dollars they will ultimately cost me, he said, “Always better to find out this way.”

I’ve never let my insurance lapse before, though I have come close. I always get a reminder in the mail at the end of the year from Public Insurance, and I guess I had come to count on that letter to make sure I remembered to fulfill this extremely important responsibility. Of mine.

When I checked my “Automobile” file at home, it turns out I had received it in December, but I mistook it for an informational letter about minor changes to the insurance price structure, even though it clearly said “RENEWAL NOTICE” at the top, and IT’S TIME TO VISIT YOUR INSURANCE AGENT somewhere in the middle. So I never acted on it, just filed it for reference.

I only got pulled over because I was in the middle of trying to make up for another stupid oversight on my part. I was hurrying home at lunch to try to track down my landlady, because it happened to be the last possible day to renew my lease. If I didn’t have my form filled out and handed in by today, I could lose my apartment. They gave me the form in mid-December. Interestingly it was dated the same day as the insurance renewal notice. Read More

by David on March 1, 2011
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What to Do About the World’s Suffering

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In all the emails I receive from readers, perhaps the most common theme is a question in this vein: how can a person be at peace with the world when there is so much suffering going on?

I don’t think I need to start rattling off specifics here — virtually every story in every newspaper is a tiny, nominal record of horrendous suffering for someone somewhere. Crimes. Deaths. Famines. Wars. Fires. Floods.

How do we live with so much suffering going on? How can I do so much as enjoy a bagel with a clear conscience while so many people are enduring unspeakable suffering?

I never really had a satisfying answer for that question most of my life, and so my only strategy was distraction. Get into something more immediate, more consuming, and those thoughts go away.

But it never really sat right with me until I began to question the usefulness of those thoughts. I think the key lies in understanding the difference between two oft-misunderstood responses to suffering.

Sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, and though they are definitely not the same thing, I can’t really say my definitions are the right ones. But I think if you read on, you’ll understand why it’s so important to make a distinction.

Both are related to feeling the suffering of others. The more common reaction is sympathy, which is essentially feeling bad because someone else feels bad. It doesn’t require an understanding of the nature of the other person’s suffering, only a mental acknowledgment that they are suffering. When you react to the suffering of another with sympathy, it means you are suffering over their suffering. However, as we suffer we become less conscious. In a state of suffering, wisdom disappears, reactivity takes over, and you begin to feel helpless.

Empathy is more subtle. It is not a reaction, but rather a capacity to be aware of the suffering of another. In sympathy we can be aware that another person is suffering, though we remain preoccupied with emotions and thoughts about the suffering, making it impossible to stay keenly aware of it.

To cultivate empathy requires that you remain receptive and stable — able to listen without judgment, to stay aware without getting indignant. Above all, it requires that you do not make their suffering yours. Read More

by David on December 2, 2010
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Where is Your Mind Right Now?

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“Amazing, isn’t it?”

The words caught me off guard, but they were clearly addressed to me, and seemed to match my thoughts exactly. A moment earlier a blond-headed little boy had, in plain view of his parents and a half dozen passers-by, pitched a half-eaten ice cream at the garbage can, missing completely and hitting the retaining wall not far from my seat on the bench. They continued down the boardwalk without a word.

When the stranger spoke I think I nodded or harrumphed or made some other corresponding gesture of disapproval. But when I looked up, I was surprised to see the old man was smiling and gesturing at the ocean, and had either missed or ignored the minor injustice that had me so appalled. The sarcastic tone I heard in his comment belonged entirely to my train of thought. He meant only what he said.

I still don’t know exactly why he bothered to stoop and say that to me — unless my preoccupied state was obvious to him even through my poker face and sunglasses, and he knew exactly what to say to reset my perspective.

After speaking to me, he turned back to the ocean and I followed his gaze. It was too ordinary for a postcard: blue sky, blue ocean, no clouds. But it had me like the dancing plastic bag in American Beauty.

My train of thought had been effectively derailed, and I was able to forget myself for a moment, thanks to that random man who said the right thing at the right time. I had been totally lost, for most of the day. It was like when a noisy fan clicks off, which you never realize was running until the moment it no longer is, leaving the most unexpectedly silent silence.

I believe life with that noisy fan is the normal state of human consciousness. This was my thirtieth day on the coast of Australia. I’d been to the beach every day. It was a sunny one like most of them, and at a casual glance this ocean scene wasn’t especially captivating, particularly for coastal Australians who see it every day. Yet he was completely taken in, and so was I.

Thought-killing moments like that do happen, but often it takes something that’s particularly forceful on one’s attention. A flaming sunset, say, is exclusive and dramatic enough to wrest anyone’s attention away from their preoccupations, at least for the fleeting few minutes when it’s at its loudest, visually.

But just as often, I’ve looked at something much more ordinary at the precise moment my head-chatter cuts out, and found myself captivated in the exact same way. A dog sniffing a curb. A old playing card in a garbage can. A swirl in my coffee. There is an unmistakable significance that can be seen in all of them, but usually we’re not really looking.

This kind of moment has been happening more and more often. The most encouraging part of it is that it doesn’t seem to matter what the content of the scene is, only whether I’m aware enough to absorb it without assessing its implications to my personal interests. When my interests and preferences aren’t informing the picture — when I am not looking at it in terms of what it’s adding or taking away from me — it’s like I can watch it without being there. I am alive and aware without the normal heaviness of being a needy, self-obsessed human being. And that is where beauty is found.

I know now that this captivating quality is always there to be seen, not just in classically picturesque locations like beaches but in parking lots, produce aisles, snowbanks and people’s faces. But it can only be noticed when thinking isn’t the prominent feature of the landscape.

This state is an anomaly for almost everyone, but I think we all know it to some degree, as an occasional acquaintance. Trains of thought seem to be bent on creating new ones constantly. I suspect that for most of us, our thinking is the prominent feature of the landscape, almost all of the time.

Our thinking is such a prominent feature of nearly every scene we witness, it can be hard to imagine that we can still be there to see the world when thought isn’t around. Indeed, most people probably live and die without ever detecting a distinction between their thinking minds and themselves.

Next time you think of it, ask yourself: Where is my mind right now? Where has it been this last hour? Are my thoughts the prominent feature in my current landscape?

I’m convinced that this same, captivating significance is present in every scene, waiting to speak to you whenever you offer it a chance. It’s unbelievably patient. It could wait a lifetime.

Photo by David Cain

by David on November 24, 2010
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9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down

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Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever.

The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it.

Maybe you’ve had some of  the same insights. Or maybe you’re about to.

1. You are not your mind.

The first time I heard somebody say that,  I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What else could I be? I had taken for granted that the mental chatter in my head was the central “me” that all the experiences in my life were happening to.

I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience. Thoughts are no more fundamental than smells, sights and sounds. Like any experience, they arise in my awareness, they have a certain texture, and then they give way to something else.

If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? Don’t answer too quickly. This question, and its unspeakable answer, are at the center of all the great religions and spiritual traditions.

2. Life unfolds only in moments.

Of course! I once called this the most important thing I ever learned. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t part of a single moment unfolding. That means life’s only challenge is dealing with the single moment you are having right now. Before I recognized this, I was constantly trying to solve my entire life — battling problems that weren’t actually happening. Anyone can summon the resolve to deal with a single, present moment, as long as they are truly aware that it’s their only point of contact with life, and therefore there is nothing else one can do that can possibly be useful. Nobody can deal with the past or future, because, both only exist as thoughts, in the present. But we can kill ourselves trying. Read More

by David on October 13, 2010
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Five Useful Headless Resources

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Well it turns out there’s been much more interest in Douglas Harding’s Headless Way than I initially thought. I’ve had quite a few lengthy comments and a lot more emails than normal. Evidently Headlessness has struck a chord with a lot of you, and people have a lot of questions.

I can’t explain everything about it here though, for three reasons. First of all, I don’t want to write about the same topic for too long because I know not everyone is interested. Secondly, I can’t do nearly as good a job describing headlessness as Douglas Harding can and already has. And finally, this is a method of self-enquiry, which means you’ll have to do most of the exploring and experimenting yourself to get the most out of it.

So here are five excellent resources on headlessness, all available from your computer chair. Read More

by David on August 26, 2010
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Headlessness FAQ

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This is the fourth article in a series about Douglas Harding’s method of self-inquiry, called headlessness. The others are here: [Post one] [Post two] [Post three]

In the previous article, I described Harding’s discovery that he, in his first-person, singular, present-tense experience, did not have a head. He insists that anyone who gives it an honest, unbiased look, will find the same thing.

Obviously it’s a preposterous claim, and it raises some questions. Here are the most common sticking points.

What is the point of this?

The point is to experience your true nature instead of just experiencing your thoughts about your true nature.

We tend to see ourselves as what our thoughts tell us we are: separate, finite bodies, tiny compared to the world we inhabit.

Nearly all of your ideas about who you are have been derived from views of you at a distance, either from other people’s accounts, or from mirrors and cameras.

From a distance of a few meters, you do appear to be a finite thing in the midst of other finite things. From zero distance, your appearance is very different, but we tend to disregard what we see ourselves to be, in favor of what we’ve learned ourselves to be from non-first-hand sources. This collection of learnings is called the ego, and most people will never suspect that it isn’t who they are. All of it is second-hand, past-tense, misleading information about who you are, observed from angles that cannot possibly see what you see.

All the major spiritual teachings inevitably point to nonduality — that there is no real separation between you and the universe around you. Many people suspect this is true, believe it is true, or want it to be true, yet it remains only an interesting concept for most.

What the Headless Way (or “headlessness”) allows you to do is to see nonduality plainly. You can physically see the seamlessness between you and the universe that contains you. This has huge implications for our relationships with others, the ego’s negative effects on our lives, human evolution and a lot more. Read More

by David on August 23, 2010
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The Decapitation of Douglas Harding

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Douglas Harding was a modern-day English philosopher who made a remarkable discovery about human nature, and developed a simple and ingenious method for guiding others to see it for themselves. This post is the third post in a series about his method. [Post one] [Post two]

Though an architect by trade, Douglas Harding was strongly drawn to philosophy, and his primary interest was answering the simple question of who he really was.

Was he a really only a six-foot bag of meat, animated by some mysterious biological energy? Or was he what the religious and spiritual masters said he was: pure, empty consciousness, undivided from the rest of the universe?

He wasn’t about to take anyone’s word for it.

While thinking about the principle of relativity, he realized that his identity depended on his distance from the observer. Looked at from a distance of a few meters, he appeared to be what could only be described as a man. But from a distance of an inch or so, “patch of skin” would be a more honest descriptor of his appearance. Zoom in further, and he became cells. At closer ranges still he became molecules, atoms, and particles.

He recognized that it worked the other way too. Observe from far enough away, and his close-range appearance as a man gives way to that of a city, then a continent, a planet, and so on.

Careful to avoid assumptions and going only off of objective observations, it was clear that what he was at three meters was nothing like what he was at three nanometers, or three billion meters.

He couldn’t deny that he had many layers of appearances, quite inseparable from one another, and all of them dependent on the distance from which he was observed.

It was also undeniable that he needed all of those layers to survive. Clearly he needed the surrounding planet to breathe and sustain himself, which in turn needed the surrounding solar system to keep it in its life-sustaining position, which in turn needed the surrounding universe to put it where it was, and so on. Looking in the other direction, he knew he also needed his constituent body parts and cells, which in turn needed their constituent molecules and atoms.

This led him to the idea of nondualism, as fabled in religious and spiritual teachings. There was no perceivable separation between the six-foot human he always figured himself to be, and the universe that surrounded it and comprised it. The only separation between Douglas the person and the remainder of the universe was an arbitrary, imagined one: the common, generally unquestioned thought that a human being ends strictly at the limits of its skin. Read More

by David on August 19, 2010
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What is the Ego, Anyway?

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“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” ~Carl Jung

Imagine just having been born.

You don’t know anything. You’ve never experienced anything.

But suddenly there is light, and chaos. You’re exposed, and cold. Blurry shapes are moving all around you. Sounds strike you with an edge much sharper they ever had in the womb. The whole scene is bright and loud, and the shapes move so quickly.

There is so much happening. It is all completely alien and extremely intense. It’s upsetting. You cry.

Among other things, you are seeing what you will later learn to call faces. But they are not faces yet. They are shapes, with a pattern that will soon become familiar to you.

You are hearing what you will later be told are voices. One of them is already very familiar to you. You will be told to call it “Mommy.”

The one thing you are certainly not aware of, is you. You are aware of all these shapes and sounds and feelings, but you aren’t perceiving them as happening to you or to anyone else. You are only aware that they are happening.

How will you ever make sense of it all?

Luckily, you are human (though you’re not aware of that yet) and human minds have the power of association. Without even trying, you begin to associate certain shapes and sounds with certain thoughts. You associate your mother’s voice with comfort. Your mother’s voice becomes comfort. You might associate the dark with sleepiness, maybe loneliness too. You might associate bathtime with fun, or horror, depending on what happens emotionally during your bathtimes.

Associations like this accumulate. From experience, X makes you expect Y. Then X begins to symbolize Y. Eventually X may become indistinguishable from Y. You’ll keep adding them over time.

This is handy for sorting out the chaos around you. You can tell, for example, that the thing with the warm hands and soothing voice is usually good news for you. It’s a simple association. This is the primary tool you’ll use to make sense of the whirling scenes around you.

You are still only looking outwards, and it has not yet occurred to you to inquire as to what is doing the looking. After all, the entirety of existence — every shape, sound, character and story — appears to be there, somewhere outwards. You don’t yet have a reason to contemplate what is at the center of all this action. Read More

by David on August 16, 2010
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